Summertime
There are long moments when Summertime chills the bones. A woman throws herself against a closed door, screaming “Let me in!” A woman who towers over the stage repeats in a commanding, stentorian voice: “Answer me!” A woman barrels from one corner to another to yell until breathless the litany “Don’t come in, don’t come in, don’t come in!…I’m not dressed.” A woman crouched in a bushel basket with a light glowing between her legs rises to her full height slowly, intoning an urgent, bluesy song about the bed she’s prepared for a loved one. “Please come home,” she pleads, “to rest in peace.”
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It seems to me that a lot of companies say more about a new kind of feminist theater than they do about it. Baubo Performance Project is doing something about it. This collective of seven young women, most of them recent graduates of Northwestern University, have here attempted not a feminist subject–a press release says the piece explores “loss and remembrance”–but a feminist approach. Writer-director Lee Anne Schmitt and the five other Baubo members who’ve choreographed, composed, and designed the piece never forget that they’re women, and they never let us forget it: everything from their long, white sleeveless dresses to their girlish voices reminds us. At the same time they’re tough on stereotypes of all kinds, never allowing the piece to come anywhere near a sweet or sentimental view.
In Summertime certain texts are repeated or woven together with others. Themes are reiterated: summer and winter, trips to the sea, illness and death, closed doors, maternal distance. Visually Baubo has created a wonderfully unified place–a kind of abandoned summer house that recalls Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse–using parasols made of dried grass and sticks, a rocking chair and stepladder in weathered gray, dilapidated sheets of butcher paper over the Link’s Hall windows, draped chairs, a string of lights overhead as if for an evening garden party, an impossibly long string of pearls on the floor, an equally long string of books. Projections against the rear wall show the patterns of leaves and branches, a negative image of a face, a color photo of a garden. We hear an Edith Piaf recording and a saxophone rendition of “Willow Weep for Me.” But as expertly as these technical devices may establish mood and even content, they aren’t what set Summertime apart.
